Today I wanted to talk about something that happened a pretty long time ago, so we're leaving good ol' Dethorin and his journey in Redridge Mountains for now. I want to talk to you about the start of my journey in World of Warcraft, the very first moments of this incredible string of events in my life. Spanning over several years myself and my older brother spent much of our young teens and early adulthood in the virtual world of Azeroth. We've done and seen so many crazy things, we've shared so many awesome and wierd experiences. We can talk about them for hours upon hours, laughing and reminiscing over a time long gone. Today life is different, we don't play games as much as we used to and we've both grown somewhat bitter and jaded of where the gaming-industry is going. However, I digress as we're here today to talk about my very first moments in World of Warcraft.

It actually started with the Korean Closed Beta, which transpired sometime mid-2004 if I'm not mistaken. I had gotten help from a friend with creating a Korean CBT(Closed Beta Test) account, which was a mess to create and hope for invite-access. Fortunately Blizzard were on a massive PR-campaign, obviously, prepping for release so the CBT back then were more like an OBT(Open Beta Test) if anything. My memory is a bit blurry on the details, which isn't surprising since its roughly 11 years ago now, but I believe my first character was actually a Dwarven hunter. I remember being so impressed and excited of the Dwarven hunter in one of the first cinematics for WoW, I just had to try one out. Naturally, I wanted a bear as a pet too, just like the dwarf in the cinematic. It wasn't long though however before I went and created my next character, a Tauren shaman. I had always loved Taurens, they were one of my favorite units to play with in Warcraft III. Even though there were only a few of them, a subset of units available for when you're playing as the Orcs, I still had a lot of fun with them. The Tauren cheiftain inspired me a lot in particular, he was a Hero-unit of great strength and power, tons of fun to play. Anyhow, as with the Dwarf I also got very inspired by the Tauren shaman in the cinematic, so I created one of those too. As the client was in Korean I didn't spend to much time leveling any of the characters up, it was mostly just to get a feel of them, learning some of the ropes and experiencing this amazing game.

Fast-forward a little bit, I got myself a key to the European CBT via a pre-order bonus which I got from pre-ordering the final game which at this point I just knew I had to play. Now I immediately created another Tauren shaman, intent on reaching further than just a couple of levels I head out in the wilderness of Mulgore. A fantastic zone, which was for many years considered the most beautiful in the game by many players. Lush, green, long and hilly plains as far as the eye could see, filled with wonders, things to see and dangers to overcome. There I was, roughly 15 years old at the time, completely new to the world of MMORPG's, its very deep and immersive online experiences. I will never forget the feeling, you felt so small and the world felt so big, so endless. There was always something new to see, behind every corner there was something new and amazing that had you stop for a moment to just take it all in. It wasn't till I was somewhere around level 6 or 7 before a friend of mine wanted to meet up. He was an Orc, somewhere in Durotar and we decided to meet somewhere roughly in the middle - The Barrens. Oh boy, what a journey it was, we're not supposed to leave our first zones untill we're around level 10. Many a corpse-runs later, we had finally found eachother somewhere just north of Camp Taurajo. I remember the sheer happiness, with navigating the world, co-ordinating our approach and corpse-running trying to meet in a world we've never seen of been before. It took us a fair bit of time and it was so worth the time and effort what went into making this a reality. There we were, it was at this point I realized what a fantastic game an MMORPG can be. We lived a few kilometres away from eachother, mobilephones barely was a thing back then, at least not for young teenagers like ourselves. We had MSN back then to communicate, but now things had changed, we could play a game together while communicating and just hanging out. The concept was new, different, a bit "unknown" and frightening, but we embraced it fully. It wasn't long till we had convinced the rest of our close friends to partake in this seemingly endless journey of fun, action and pure adventure. We prepared for the upcoming launch of World of Warcraft, we were ready.

Something happened though, as time went on, and I'm not sure I can explain why this happened. I started to play WoW more and more, when I had played all day with my friends and they logged out for the night. I logged in to another character and kept on playing by myself. I didn't want to stop, I didn't want to leave this world, I had set goals which was somewhat easily attainable and I had the ability to complete them on my own. I knew where I was going, it was an easy thing to understand and grasp. It was an escape from reality, which at the time wasn't something I was very fond of. In whole my life I've never really had any true goals, I never knew what I wanted to be or what I wanted to do. Looking ahead was difficult to me, the reality was uncertain, unclear and I didn't know where to take it. It felt like I had little control, it just went along for the ride. Now, I didn't fail in school, I did what I was supposed to but nothing more. However, I spent more and more time online in WoW than I did doing other stuff like I used to. I still remember to this day the first time I declined an invite to hang out with my friends, just because I wanted to play WoW instead. I was on my Tauren warrior, this was later when WoW had been released, I was leveling in Stranglethorn Vale and I was standing in Booty Bay collecting quests. I didn't think of it much back then, I mean, I just wanted to play some WoW instead of going out that night. However, seeing as I remember this night, this particular event, it stands out pretty significantly from all of the other events that happened that early on. Its most likely because it was a turning point in my life, I no longer needed my friends to have fun. They were still there, we still hung out during school, but not as much afterwards anymore. Sure, it happened on occasions like it always had but not as often as it used to. Today, turning down something because you just don't feel like it, doesn't really catch anyones attention unless it happens all of the time and at that point they just stop calling. At that time though, your friends were for a lot of people everything, it was their whole persona, a big part of their "existance" in a way. We sort of got defined by the people we hung out with, whether we liked it or not. Turning down a night with the boys? That just didn't happen unless you were very sick, grounded or had tons of homework to do. Doing it because you just wanted to play a game instead? Now that at the time was weird, pretty weird indeed. I remember having to think, "What should I say, how should I phrase this so that they understand?", I don't remember exactly what I said but I'm going to assume that it was close to the truth. I wanted to play World of Warcraft.